


Milk and Ashes

by elviaprose



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: Hangover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 21:08:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14293491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: Uriah Heep nurses David oh so patiently back into 'ealth and 'appiness following a drunken night on the town.





	Milk and Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is an alternate version of the events following David's "first dissipation" in Chapter 24. Uriah is in London at this time in the novel, so this is only a slight revision of the plot. ....Well, in some ways.
> 
> Thanks to x_los for the beta.

I woke to someone calling for me again and again. I knew the voice only too well. I had been one part drowsing, one part waking, and one part drowned, and so it was not a heavy, muddy waking. I was nevertheless in extreme physical distress and still far out of my ordinary temper, despite my impairment from the wine having diminished greatly since my shutting my eyes on the world. I experienced some degree of confusion upon hearing Uriah Heep’s voice, for I’d no notion he had business in London, let alone at my door. Oh, I thought, would that my actions upon leaving Canterbury were all but a dream, that I might heed the warning of that nightmare and yet go forth afresh to make my way in the world. What a fool I had made of myself last night! The knocking still came, and seemed to be on my aching skull rather than the door. I cursed Uriah Heep.

Uriah’s knocking informed me that Steerforth had taken it upon himself shut the outer door to my rooms behind him upon leaving me, thoughtfully shielding me from any intrusion by Mrs. Crupp. When not barred entry, Mrs. Crupp would typically come up from her rooms below mine into my outer chamber with my morning pot of coffee, and then later return with whatever else I should need by way of nourishment. Mrs. Crupp was never timely, but Steerforth had rightly observed that however late she might be in bringing my coffee, it would be too early in my wine-sodden state. I now recalled some silliness about the door upon going in with Steerforth. I had, I think, urged him to shut the door behind us as we came in. I had told him that he who shut the door to these rooms was the king of the castle, and so of course he should do it, for wherever I was master, so was he. I had intended to convey something of all that. I very much doubt that in my state of disgrace I expressed much beyond the most basic outlines of the sentiment.

"Master Copperfield, are you at home? Master Copperfield! Are you quite all right, Master Copperfield?" It was, to my dismay, a perfectly decent hour for that perfectly decent caller, and it was greatly to my discredit that I was in no condition whatever to receive him. There was no use at all pretending I was out. Mrs. Crupp, who had surely heard me come raucously in, and _not_ go out again, had surely informed him otherwise.

I was certain Uriah Heep had come to take me to Agnes. That I must go with him seemed as inevitable as the last judgment itself. He must march me, staggering and miserable, to her door, where I would collapse in shame at her feet and weep until she forgave me or until Uriah, like some minion of hell, gathered me up and took me away again to live and die in infamy. Speech was required. I forced my thick tongue to call out to Uriah that I would be but a moment. 

Uriah, who had always seemed to possess almost infinite patience, must surely have been tried nonetheless. I must have exceeded a quarter hour in my preparations. I could not seem to make anything right. Twice I failed in getting up from the bed. My vision kept receding into a dim haze. I felt as though London’s fog had gathered itself all inside my head, leaving the sun to shine out on Uriah Heep and all the upright men of England. The buttons of my waistcoat roundly refused to go into their proper holes. I gave up the attempt to put them to rights before making anything of it, feeling myself so ill and at such a pitch of frustration that I feared I might tear them off if I persisted further. The pain in my head was joined by an agony in my toe after I barked it twice against my furniture. Yesterday's bear grease had put my hair into a state of disorder which the comb seemed unable to remedy, whatever I tried with it. 

I opened the door, and there Uriah waited. He showed infinite surprise to at last behold me. 

“Master Copperfield!” Uriah cried, his voice doing scales like he was training for the opera. “It really is Master Copperfield!” Words cannot express what a torture these exclamations were to me. It was all I could do not to put my hands over my ears to spare my aching head. I am sure I flinched and winced my way through his greeting.

As his lidless eyes narrowed and took my measure top to toe, missing nothing, flickering like candle flames, roving over and down and back again at ferocious speed, I wished I had made him wait however long it would have taken, a year if necessary, if it meant I did not need to meet him in such a state as I was in.

Uriah himself looked unchanged. He never seemed to me to alter. I felt certain that were I to know him into old age, I would insist, counter to what must plainly be the fact of the matter, that he had never changed at all since I had first laid eyes on him. He was as thin as he had been at fifteen, it seemed to me. His hair was still a short red bristle, his face still seemed older than its years, but no older than it had been. 

“Oh, but you are grown so much, it is Mister Copperfield now,” he said, his voice very quiet and slow. Then his voice rose again, very suddenly. “Mister Copperfield!” he cried, “what a pleasure it is. Oh, what an indescribable pleasure it is!”

I started a little back from him. I found I could only catch myself against Uriah’s lank body, though he was far from so much as faintly resembling a trusty tree (as in the old song).  
I have little doubt that his senses were then assailed with the evidence of my sins. His winking nostrils must have taken in the wine on my breath, and that which had spilled down my waistcoat (it seemed, though I had tried to impress upon myself that I must clothe myself in anything but yesterday's stained garment, I had nonetheless failed in that effort). Close as I was, I felt the breath huff out of him, and heard it--for it was not quite silent--as my hand closed around his shoulder.

“Oh, but it’s a pity I don’t find you in better ‘ealth! I hope it is not often that you find yourself suffering so, since you left us.” He shook his head in dismay.

I realized I had been observing how sharply I could feel the bones of his shoulder through his suit, rather than doing anything to extricate myself or otherwise better my situation. He had kept himself still as a post while I clutched at him, but as I moved to separate myself, his arm came curling around my waist. As was often the case with any interchange with Uriah, I was not certain if I liked it. 

“I hope it is not a serious complaint,” Uriah said. There was no doubt in my mind that he knew precisely the nature of my ailment. It did not matter what Agnes had told him of the state in which she had encountered me last night. The truth could not have been more fully before him if the foremost writer in England had taken it up. 

I grasped at what little dignity I had left. “My activities last night have put me out of my usual health, but I am sure any future meeting between us will find me in finer form. I have resolved that this will be both the first and last time that I am to be found in such a state.” 

"Oh, ain’t it always so!” He said, with a hard grin that invited no sense of sympathy at all between us. “But you must forgive yourself if things don’t come out just that way. The straight and narrow path is narrow indeed, and a person might stumble off so easily. And I wouldn’t say you ain’t in fine form now, Master Copperfield. Although if I might take the great liberty of assisting you a little in making yourself more orderly---" His left hand, which unlike his right was not occupied in holding me upright, ventured a little towards my buttons. So tentative was the overture that I was somehow certain that he was immensely eager to be permitted to do it.

Shamed, but feeling that it was better to endure anything other than to face Agnes as I was now, I consented. His long fingers were clever in the task I'd despaired of. If that row of little buttons had been a regiment of soldiers, I felt certain Uriah Heep could have ranked among the most commanding of generals, a very Wellington. How sober, how decent he was, buttoned to the throat as ever--I envied him as I never had before.

"Well, now that I'm put as much to rights as I might hope to be, in the circumstances," said I, swallowing as much of my shame as I could (my mouth was very dry, for all I had drunk), "We can get on with it."

"Why, get on with what, Master Copperfield?" We stood close enough for me to see that he did after all possess eyebrows; it was only that the hairs were exceedingly fine and fair. They contracted now in a gesture of confusion.

"With your bringing me to Miss Wickfield." 

"With fetching you for Miss Agnes? Goodness no, Master Copperfield, that’s not what I’m about today! I'd not take the errand of collecting you amiss, of course. Not leastwise! Though I am come up a little in the firm.” I could not tell if he was offended that I had supposed him to be running this errand or pleased that I had. I wondered what he meant by this last, but I could not find the strength to ask. My head ached too much. Though I entreated it silently to stop its pounding, it did not heed me. Each word sank into my ears like a stone into the slow-moving slime of the river, and disappeared. 

”I come on my own account, for the pleasure of seeing such an old friend as yourself. And such a pleasure it is! No, no, Master Copperfield, in good time you can make your way to your dear Agnes and make her your umble apologies, if you find it fitting to be umble before her--as ever I do, myself, but first you must restore your ealth and appiness! I had not expected to find you in such a condition,” Uriah said. I wondered if that were true. It seemed he had, after all, spoken to Agnes, if he knew I had met her last night. "You are not in a fit state for a long talk over a cup of coffee, and I can see that very well, and I shall of course umbly take myself off the instant you desire it! But--you’ll forgive me suggesting it, I hope--I do believe I could be of some elp to you in improving your present state. Why, my esteemed partner--but I go before myself once more with that--” I felt him convulse against me, the hand at my waist clutching and grasping, “Why, Mister Wickfield, as you know, is given to taking his port wine of an evening. He doesn’t like to presume too much on Miss Agnes' care, though she is as obliging as I am, that's certain, and so it's fallen to me many a time to help him put himself to rights when he finds himself--well, it is difficult to put it into words, aint it? I don’t imagine you would do it--” A pause stretched out, in which I did not oblige him, and then he went on: “He finds himself of a morning or afternoon in a state not unlike yours at the present time. I’d have you in fine form quick as I ever ‘ave ‘im--ready to face the world the great lawyer he is. If you only say the word. A little vinegar on your brow, a warm cup of milk with a bit of soot in it.”

I could not understand why Uriah should be so ready to pass his day in such a fashion, but it seemed infinitely more difficult to send him away than to yield, and so I led him through. All the while, he clutched me against his lank frame.

“Thank you, Uriah,” I said weakly, as he guided me at last to bed. 

“Oh no!” he said forcefully, his mouth drawn down and twisted. “You musn’t thank me! I must umbly thank you, of course I must, for permitting me your company.” 

He insisted upon opening my window, that he could see my view of the river. The sunlight (which indeed shone bright that day) was a torture that his praise of the London scene did nothing to ease. 

“Oh, you poor thing,” he murmured, for I had cried out when the sunlight struck me. He then began undoing my buttons again, this time a little less briskly. It seemed a terrible waste, that he should lose all of his work in putting my buttons in their place, but he didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, he seemed to enjoy pushing them out of their holes.

“How ever did you get out of all of these buttons last night? You must have been even worse off then,” he said.

“A dear friend--James Steerforth helped me to bed--” I said, jerkily, flushing top to toe with mortification. He did not miss my blush.

“Oh, that is very fortunate! _You_ are very fortunate to have such a friend as him!” He said this with great enthusiasm, but his mouth turned down a little, drooping from its usual unsmiling position. I was not certain why he should frown at this, and so momentary was this expression of his displeasure that I doubted it had ever come and gone at all. 

“I’ll fetch a few items, you just shut your weary eyes a little,” he said, rubbing his hands together with vigorous enthusiasm. His clammy hand smoothed over my brow, and he hurried out of the room with his splay-footed gait.

I dozed as Uriah had bade me until he returned. It was a curious relief to me to follow Uriah’s instructions, to put myself into his hands. For his part, he set to curing me as though it was the chief vocation of his life. How patiently he held the cup for me while I choked on milk and ashes. How resolutely his icy hand held me steady!

After a time he began a stream of talk--he seemed to speak almost as if he were not aware of doing it, as though he were in a curious dream of his own--I say of his own, for I listened in but a half-waking state. He seemed aware of my distraction, for he did not quite seem to speak to me as though I marked him fully, in expectation of reply. He told me I was his particular friend and he was exerting himself a little more for me than he did for Mr. Wickfield. He said this without any evident tenderness, and yet he stroked his hands through my hair as he said it. He told me about his work for Wickfield, the particulars of his business, as well as his ascendancy, and how pleased he was to be entering formally into the firm as a partner. Poor Wickfield, he said, how far gone he was now, with his habit of drowning his worries in his port. I was distressed to hear how Wickfield had suffered, though I was not entirely shocked. Distantly I felt my own shame, and how each mention of Wickfield’s affliction drove me deeper into it. 

He told me more of his childhood; his time at a foundation school, and how his father had come to die while he was still young. He told me too little tidbits about the law in general, rather than the particularities of his business. 

In the early afternoon Uriah left again briefly, and returned with a plate of bread and butter and another cup of milk, this one without any ashes in it. 

I was still unfit for any activity but lying in bed, but told Uriah I was mending fast and that he might leave if he wished. Had Uriah eaten, himself? I asked. He said that if I wished him to go, he would certainly do so, but he had had a saveloy while he was out, and he was only too appy to stay. A pause followed, and he looked at me watchfully, his eyes flickering once again.

I said he might stay if he liked. My eyes ached too much for reading, and my head too much for sleeping, and his company was the only entertainment to hand I could conceive of enduring. 

“Oh, I am very blessed with your friendship, Master Copperfield,” he said in a low voice.

He offered to read to me a little, if I should like it. The complete works of Shakespeare was by my bed, and he took it in his skeleton hands and leafed through it a little. His choice was all too near to the mark. Poor Cassio was lamenting his drunken stupidity to the devious Iago. 

“Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!” Uriah cried, rendering Michael Cassio in a high, pathetic voice. He shocked me by losing his own accent entirely for the part. I hadn’t had any notion he could do it. Iago, however, he rendered in nearly his own accents, but a little deeper: “As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition: oft got without merit, and lost without deserving: you have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.”

It was too much to be borne. I was not certain if he was goading me deliberately, but it simply could not be borne.

“Oh, I am wretched!” I cried out, breaking in with sudden fierceness. He looked truly taken aback. I had wondered if he had chosen that scene especially to drive me deeper into my shame, but so great was his surprise that at once I doubted it. “The shame of it all!  
“Last night I did a thousand things I remember and a thousand more I’ve forgotten, Uriah,” I whispered to him.

Uriah’s brow creased. He seemed to be brought up short by the force of my outcry. He scraped his jaw with his hand a while.

“It isn’t just the drink, is it? Or how you appeared before Miss Agnes.” He regarded me carefully, and I could see him putting the whole of his mind to understanding. “Did he sod you last night, your friend?” he asked, after scraping at his chin a while. 

“What?” I looked at him agast. “Good heavens, no! I would not--he would not--!” I cried. I was shocked that such a notion was within his understanding. But my surprise was not, alas, down to such a thought being out of my own compass. To the torment of my conscience, though we had done nothing of the sort, I had half dreamed of it the whole night, after Steerforth had undressed me. I had kept telling him to fetch a corkscrew, and my thoughts of that corkscrew going into the cork had become all muddled up with thoughts of what it should be like if I were the cork, and he the corkscrew. 

“Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t he?” Uriah said slowly. “Wasn’t it in your mind to do it--perhaps as he was elping you home, or--elping you into your bed?” It was as though he had looked into my mind and read the whole history of the evening. 

“It was not! It is an unthinkable act--” I said, but I think Uriah knew that he had found me out. He pressed his hands together very hard, and dried them furiously on his handkerchief. His eyes stared at the floor. Then, he swallowed visibly, his long throat moving like a snake sucking down an egg.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, Master Copperfield, if I umbly attest that it ain’t so bad a thing to do as all that, by my lights,” he said.

“You’ve done it?” I asked, still astounded. I had never before imagined that he might wish to do such a thing, or considered that if he had wished it, he would dare. 

“I ave been around and about,” he said with a hard smile. “Are you quite certain you’ve never thought of it? I am surprised to hear you say so! I must confess to you, I had thought you had. You may tell me, Master Copperfield, if that ain’t exactly the case, for I have already confided in you.” 

It was not a desire that I had much acknowledged in myself. At Creakle’s school we had liked to shock one another with terrible tales of the greater world. We reported to each other all manner of gruesome murders and accidental deaths. One boy had declared that some men liked to sod each other. It had not seemed impossible to me that he spoke the truth, but it had seemed impossible to me that I should ever like it. It had seemed more frightening than anything else. Yet last night, when I had been out of my wits and susceptible to all manner of notions, the idea that I should enjoy a sodding very much indeed had taken a fierce hold of me.

I do not think the desire could have gripped me so strongly if some corner of my soul had not already thought of it. After Steerforth had spoken of the sister I didn’t have, and how sweet she would have been, I had thought of what it should be like if I myself were, after all, a pretty girl called Betsey, and if he should court me and if we should marry and he should kiss me every day. I had nearly forgotten how, after Traddles had had a beating from Creakle, and through it all not admitted he was ill because of the food I’d shared with him, I had wanted so very much to come and kiss him, when Traddles lay on his bed, that I had done it before I could think. He had been surprised, and I had been a little embarrassed, and then I had forgotten I had done it. But I remembered it now. And then, most of all, strongest off all, there had been Uriah himself. There had always been something in the way he had looked at me and touched me that had been out of the ordinary, and that had stirred me strangely. 

I thought it might be a relief to unburden myself to him, after all.

“I have thought of it, Uriah,” I said quietly. 

“Oh, thank you for that confidence!” he said softly, but with great emphasis. “But I ain’t at all glad to know you are suffering over it--as I see you are. If I may counsel you a little--I think it’s that the act is all obscure to you. Bring the thing into the daylight. Do it rather than merely dreaming of it, and you’ll see there’s nothing much to fear. There’s no real crime, is there? Where’s the harm? Here I am and here you are, not quite so ill as you were, and thinking of it already--” He did not leer at me, or laugh, or do anything but look down at the floor with his lidless red eyes.

He let a pause stretch, and I looked at him questioningly.

“If he wouldn’t do it, I certainly would,” Uriah said, more plainly than he had ever said anything to me before.

I thought of all of the queer glances and touches that had passed between us in our years of acquaintance, of how I had always found I could look at him for ages, of how curious I always felt about him, how drawn to him. I imagined his long fingers skating carefully over my body, like I was his law book, and I trembled with interest.

“Yes,” I said. “All right.” I was afraid, but I longed for it desperately.

For a moment, he looked as shocked as if I had struck him. Then, with almost frantic speed, he pushed me onto my front and tugged and prodded until cool air touched my skin. The last time I had been in such a position, I had been about to have a caning. I was just as tense with anxiety as I had ever been then. I shut my eyes tightly and clung to the bedclothes. 

Uriah scrabbled about with the various cures he’d laid out on the table until he came up with something that would make one of his hands slick. That moment’s delay seemed unbearably long, but I felt entirely powerless--to move, to speak, to urge him to hurry or to ask him to stop. I counted my breaths and inhaled the soapy smell of the linens. I wished Uriah would say something, anything, but knew it was hardly a fair demand, when I was as active in the proceedings as fly in amber. 

I started when he touched me again, but it was a relief that he did so, at last. Then his long, long finger slid slowly, slowly in. I had never known anything remotely like that touch. How strange, to live so long inside my body and to never know it could be put to such a use as that. Oh, how I loved it. How I craved those pale fingers of his. The intensity of the sensation was enough to free me of my paralysis enough that I could cry out, and I did, and broke myself out of my silence that way. Then I could speak more, and told him I liked it, and asked if he might tell me what it was he was doing as he did it.

“Why do you ask me to do that?” Uriah asked. “Can it be you are already hoping to learn how it’s done, so you might try it out with somebody else?” He drew in a breath I could hear. “So soon after saying you’d never do it at all?” 

I thought he was goading me, teasing me. I did not think he might be jealous. “It’s only that it will be a comfort and--a pleasure, I think,” I replied, a little bashful and a little offended.

“I won’t so much as twitch a finger but I’ll tell you of it, Master Copperfield,” he said. I took one of his hands in mine, and I thought it might be trembling a little, though I could not be sure. He was as good as his word, and told me everything: I am softening you up for it. I’m making you ready for me to put my cock in, but it will be some time. I am being as patient as anything. It’s tender here, but if one finds the right places to press--ah, see, like that-- (I had cried out again)--it will be quite a nice thing for you.

Sensation went through me like hot knives, if hot knives were mostly very pleasurable when they went through one. Uriah seemed to be be going very softly--if he had done this before, he had not done it so often that he could do it carelessly, I thought. Gentle as Uriah was, it was not a nurse’s care now, not as it had been when he was tending me. For now he was quite dedicated to my pleasure. When my breath sped up, he asked me if I was afraid, or if that were because I was liking it better and better. 

“Better and better,” I whispered, and Uriah let out a choked out sound of delight--real delight, which seemed to burst from him.

At length he stopped the movements of his fingers.

“Now I’m--at very, very long last--I’m going to put my cock in,” he said in a sighing voice. 

He was hard and hot and when he did it he let out a cry that sounded to me defiant, but not entirely unafraid. I was too shocked to cry out. I was surprised that it didn’t hurt. I had thought it must.

“We needn’t keep ourselves down. We needn’t deny ourselves. We’ll take what we want, won’t we?” He demanded, and he leaned down and pressed a hot, clumsy kiss to the skin behind my ear, his tongue running over the skin there and making me wild. 

I had no reply, and simply buried myself deeper into the bed, gasping with enjoyment. The sensation was a little broader, but it began to go all through all of my body, to take me up in it. It was quite different, and infinitely better, than my imaginings the night before. There had been pleasure, but only a little, and they had been torturously repeated, half formed things, the feeling of which seemed to wash over me against my will. Now it was a comfort to me that it was not my own heated mind betraying me into it, helpless against itself, but Uriah sending me tumbling from pleasure to pleasure, sharing in it, his hand in mine and both his body and his passion as real as anything I had ever known.

“Oh, Lord save me, it really is beyond it all. May I die this instant, this is perfect happiness,” Uriah said this confidentially to me, as though he were enjoying letting me in on a very great secret, but one he was proud of. 

I heard him, but by that time I could only hear--I could not think, could not speak, myself.

He spasmed and then dropped over me. I could feel his his narrow chest, hot as fire even through his clothes, his heart fast as a moth’s wings, his breath frantic. He seemed unable to move for a moment, but at length he shifted away from me. I was still aching and needful.

“I’m not--I don’t think--” I said clumsily, seeking to express this fact to him politely.  
“Oh, no,” Uriah said with great enthusiasm. “We aren’t finished yet at all.”

He used his mouth to finish me off, licking and kissing, and then stroking with his hand where he’d left my body vulnerable to the highest pitch of feeling. 

He offered me a crooked sort of smile when I was done. But I could not respond with one of my own. I felt a wave of distress crash again over me, so sudden and absolute it seemed hardly to originate with me. I felt sinful and afraid, unsure of how I could have ever agreed to such a thing. I turned away and let the tears come for a moment.

“I am worse than ever,” I said. “It has not cured me of my shame. My heart hurts with it.” The tears flowed more easily than usual, in my body’s excited state. 

He made a sound like I had kicked him in the shins, and I could tell he was writhing in his unhappiness beside me.

“You liked it,” he muttered, and I turned back to him to find that his face was very red, and very badly twisted with distress. We are quite alike, Uriah and I, in how readily we flush scarlet. “You did like it. As well as you would have with him, or better.”

“Yes,” I said wretchedly. 

“Ah, Copperfield,” he then said, with quite surprising sympathy.

I found I was crying again, and buried my face deeply in the bed to hide my tears as well as I could. Uriah’s hand was still pressed into my back. He splayed it out, and began, without moving his hand, to draw the fingers of it forward and backwards on my skin. “You are a tender thing, ain’t you?’ he said. “How a hard thing it must be to feel such a thing so sharply. I won’t feel it myself--not on my life. For shame is a way to keep them down as don’t rightly deserve it.”

I tried to tell him I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant to be hurtful to him, but there hardly seemed to be words to express it. “Please forgive me,” I said. “You have done nothing to merit my receiving your affections in such a way.”

I turned back towards him, and he set about drying my tears with with his neckerchief. No one had done anything of the kind for me in my life but Peggotty, and it made me feel as if he had wrung my heart hard in one of his long hands. After he was finished he turned away and fumbled in his rumpled breast pocket. “I’ve kept something back from you. I have ere a letter from Miss Agnes for you.” He took it out and handed it to me. “Go on, read it out.”

'My dear Trotwood. I am staying at the house of papa's agent, Mr. Waterbrook, in Ely Place, Holborn. Will you come and see me today, at any time you like to appoint? Ever yours affectionately, 

AGNES.'

“Now, you see? You are forgiven. It would take very much indeed before you weren’t thought well of any longer by those that love you, for you are kind and good-hearted, and you are easy to think well of,” he said. I realized with surprise that though he spoke only of Agnes, he really meant to imply that he shared her sentiments. I had never thought before that Uriah did not love me--it was only when I heard him nearly say as much that I realized I had not ever considered that he might. I felt a little dizzy with it, and quite pleased, and terribly guilty all over again.

“You’re being very kind,” I said to him, with no little humbleness (I am not sure he has ever truly felt such a thing, but I did, just then).

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “My poor old ‘art is able to be kinder to you than I expected. I’ve tricked myself into it, I suppose. I thought I’d like to lord it over you a little today, and next thing, here I am--.” 

“Lord it over me?” I asked, in surprise. 

“Didn’t you know that?” Uriah said, with equal confusion to my own. “Though I admit I did not expect you would mind Mr. Shakespeare so much as you did--I didn’t imagine you could really feel it so keenly as you did, by alf. For what man in ten would? There wouldn’t be alf the sin there is.” 

I supposed I had, curiously, made very little effort to understand what he had been doing, and why, in all our years of shared acquaintance. Perhaps I had known that to try would lead me into murky depths indeed. I tried to decide if it angered or distressed me to hear him declare such malign intentions--I did not like to hear it, certainly, but it seemed as though it had all happened a long time ago. I found it did not in the least shake my gratitude towards him. It seemed to me there was very little to forgive in him, against what he had forgiven in me.

“Master Copperfield,” he said, a little nervously, “I admit I have enjoyed putting myself above you, where I could, for I had always thought that you considered yourself quite above _me_. But though I have had unseemly feelings in my breast--I admit it--I have always liked you very well. It has always been my pleasure to be a elp to you where you needed it. I have always hoped for your company, and sought it whatever way I could. ” 

And he loved me. I could not doubt it. Even when he had been lording it over me, as he had put it, he had loved to look at me, and he had touched me everywhere he could find the least excuse for. When he had been inside me, he had been happy as I had never known him to be.

I was moved to think over my own actions, and my own passions. It was not, as it had been for Cassio, my place in the world that I most feared losing, though I had certainly felt myself disgraced. What I hated was losing myself to my own urges, my own passions. It seemed a terrible thing to be wild and wanton and helpless against myself. But I saw that where I had really failed was in my unkindness to others. I had hurt no one in surrendering to my desire, and yet I had hurt Uriah very much indeed with my shame. The true wrong I had done last night had been in frightening poor Agnes, who already had her father, afflicted with that same vice, to worry over. As for what I felt for Uriah in return--my attraction to him and interest in him had always been greater than what I felt towards any other man, even Steerforth. There was not a soul in the world who, if he had made such an offer as Uriah had made, would have received a response of equal intensity. I thought I could grow very fond of him, if I allowed myself to really contemplate him, as I had never quite had the courage to do. 

“Thank you, Uriah,” I said. “Perhaps you are right about shame-- that we often wrong ourselves to feel it when we are harming no one. And yet if I did not feel shame, I should not know the pleasure of receiving your kindness in the face of it, should I?”

This seemed not quite sufficient to make the matter right, and so I put my arms around him and kissed him. I liked doing it--I liked it terribly, and as I did it I thought of how much I should like to make him as happy as I could, to make him laugh, to go about arm in arm with him, to talk into the night before the fire, to go through the papers to find a play that he would especially like.

“Copperfield,” he said with feeling, “my dear Copperfield. I am not the same man I was when I came through your door.”

I clasped him tighter. “Nor am I, Uriah,” I said, “and only time shall tell what these two new men shall be to one another. But come back tomorrow, and I am certain I shall be better company to you than I have been before.”


End file.
